


first you'll see me on the news (then never again)

by strongandlovestofic



Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: (i return to the cave i crawled out of), (just a li'l bit), (this is the best thing i will ever type), Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Anal Sex, Assassins & Hitmen, Background Relationships, Body Horror, Consensual Mind Control, Dubious Morality, First Time, Government Agencies, Great Escapes, Heists, I TYPOED IT BEFORE how embarrassing, M/M, Mind Control, POV Second Person, Partial Mind Control, Size Kink, did i already say dubious morality, i bet he writes terrible smut, listen i'm not john grisham, pat's stretch armstrong dick, pgmc but make it more, the actual inner workings of the government agencies in this fic are Not Structurally Sound, the pentagon is not this easy to hoodwink i am sure, wacky fun sex times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:41:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28236357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strongandlovestofic/pseuds/strongandlovestofic
Summary: You google the Bureau of Enhanced Defense. There’s an actual honest-to-God link on the website to self-report preternatural abilities and help your community.You’re not naive enough to trust the government. But if you could do something more than fucking saving cats from trees —
Relationships: Brian David Gilbert/Patrick Gill
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30
Collections: Polygolidays Gift Exchange 2020!





	first you'll see me on the news (then never again)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greenonions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenonions/gifts).



> greenoooo you are a joy and a treat and the spiciest straight i know, and i hope you enjoy this little fic, and also have a kind and lovely new year ♥♥♥

Your parents have always called you special. That’s just what every kid’s parents say though, unless they’re assholes — _you’re the best. You’re unique. You can be whatever you want to be._

You’re seven when you knock your mom’s heirloom pepper shaker off the dinner table. It’s one of the only things she’s got that’s truly personal here; small enough it doesn’t take up much weight, given to her by her grandmother or her great aunt or some old woman you haven't met, and functional. It's part of a set, a milk maid (salt) and a shepherd (pepper) who fit together in an embrace. 

You hear her gasp as it tumbles towards the floor and you reach for it, pure reaction, and then there's silence. 

You’ve caught the pepper shaker. 

Your arm is longer than it should be. 

It stretches unnaturally at the elbow, like your forearm turned into silly putty. 

“Patrick,” your dad says, and you can’t read his tone. 

“I didn’t do anything,” you say back, unable to look away from the way your arm is lengthened, and you drop the pepper shaker. It falls three inches to the floor as your arm slithers back into place, and the nose chips off the little Welsh shepherd. 

💫💫💫 

You’re not supposed to say anything about it, let alone do it again. 

You’re eleven and the class bully is named Mike. There are three Mikes in your grade, and they’re all kind of jerks: but Mike Rasmussen is a total butthead. (Rhi called him a butthole but she actually _said the word_ , and then told you she didn't say _anything_.) 

You’re walking home from school when you hear the yelling from the alley, the one with the overhanging plum tree that you sometimes grab plums from — the high-up ones, where no one could reach, not even a grown-up — and it’s Mike Rasmussen shoving another kid against a chainlink fence while the kid flails at him. 

You’re frozen in place. You should do something. You’re not supposed to _do anything_. 

When you land the punch against Mike Rasmussen’s cheek, you’re running towards them but you’re still maybe ten feet away and your arm’s all thin, stretched out between the two of you, your fist whole and maybe a little bigger than it should be, and Mike Rasmussen screams and the other kid screams and you see something fly to the pavement. 

You realize later, walking together with the kid you’d _saved, you saved me, you were so fast I didn’t even see you run up!_ that you’d knocked a tooth outta Mike Rasmussen’s head. It makes you feel — gross. The rush of vicious power followed by the placating approval of the other kid telling you how cool you are. 

How you saved him. 

💫💫💫 

At fourteen you realize, uh, that you really can stretch every part of your body. Including, uh. _Including._

Paulie goes on and on about how Jessica Taylor totally wanted to blow him under the bleachers but they got caught by Ms. Washington, and your friends all start bragging about how they've _totally_ gotten blowjobs from their _many_ girlfriends, and you carefully don't say anything about your frigging Stretch Armstrong dick. 

💫💫💫 

Your family doesn’t watch a lot of TV but your parents love _60 Minutes_ like they’re already retired, and once the segment starts you know they only leave it on because they think you’re in your bedroom doing your homework, not trying to find something to eat in the kitchen. 

So you hear Lesley Stahl say that _one event changed a small town, and a family, forever. What do you do, after all, when you realize your child has preternatural abilities? How do you make sure that they — and their communities — are given the resources they need to thrive? Tonight, we’ll learn about how a girl in Washington is giving back to her town, and the country._

You sneak time on the family computer after everyone’s gone to bed. After _you_ should be in bed. You brought a blanket in case you have to cover the monitor and yourself — your mom’s sight’s bad enough that as long as there’s no light leaking out, she won’t see you if she gets up to pee. 

You pull up Yahoo! and — fuck, you can’t remember the girl’s name, so you search for “scream washington superhero” which, amazingly, works; and that’s how you find out a girl named Simone de Rochefort is one of the first (or at least most visible) recruits for the Bureau of Enhanced Defense. (Nobody makes any number of obvious _BED_ jokes.) 

The article ends with the only quote directly from the girl, instead of from the agency or her parents or even the mayor of her hometown: 

_“I just want to help people.”_

💫💫💫 

Somebody’s harassing girls in the Andro showers and it’s not the biggest problem on campus but it’s one you can see an immediate solution to. 

You’re 19 and you’re at UMaine and you don’t live in Andro but the girl you met at orientation and have been dating since the third week _does_ , and she’s so skeeved out about it — the guy (you both assume) will break in and mess with the lights or the toilet paper. Leave shit — _literal_ shit — in the sinks. Remove all of the curtains, or cut slits in them. The fact that Housing hasn’t done anything actionable aside from tell the residents they’re _investigating the issue_ is bullshit. They could hire a guard maybe? Post an RA at the doors? Fuck, they’d probably say that was some kind of violation of privacy, but regardless — it keeps happening, and it sucks. 

You find him because every time you spend the night with her (don’t tell the RA, who sucks at his job) you sneak your ear above the door to her room, down the hall, and into the bathroom. You doze, rustling only when you hear a voice — one of the girls on the floor, usually, at which point you slide your ear back out until they’ve left. Except for the one night you hear the sound of shredding, cheap plastic. 

It’s quicker to slide out of bed, knock him into the tile of the shower stalls, and then bind his hands with the same shower curtain he just destroyed than get the RA. 

“I did, uh, karate,” you tell your girlfriend when she stares at you from the people crowded around the bathroom door. 

💫💫💫 

“I always feel like.” She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth. “Like you’re.” 

You’re 21 and the two of you have always clicked, you know, you do the whole dumbass _finish each other’s sentences_ thing, and she doesn’t get annoyed when you bogart the toilet in her studio to vacate your ass after eating ice cream, even as she laughs about buying you Lactaid. 

You’re sitting in her car and she’s staring at the steering wheel, and she hasn’t blinked in what seems like five minutes. You don’t know what to say. Her voice... you’re terrified, the emotion collapsing over you like a wave. Overwhelmed by it, stuck in fight or flight — you _freeze_ , apparently — because whatever it is she’s gonna say is going to hurt. 

“I don’t really _know_ you,” is what she says. You swallow, your hands sweaty on your thighs. Of course she does. She’s met your parents. She’s met your _grandparents_. You want to tell her this, but she keeps going: 

“Like, where were you on Friday?” 

You were supposed to meet her at Neville Hall for the free movie. You were patrolling the second floor of Fogler because somebody’d been jerking off between the stacks and leaving it for the staff to clean up. 

“I — just had a thing,” you say, because you can’t tell her you’d caught the guy, dick in hand as he jizzed over a copy of _The Fountainhead_ — you hope it was an instance of commentary and not titillation. You’d stretched your head over the stacks to peak down the next one over and see if you could find anybody and. Well, you did. 

She closes her eyes. Her hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Pat, what does that _mean_?” she asks, and you can’t tell her. You don’t do anything around campus in an official capacity. Most of the time, they don’t know you had anything to do with how the graffiti on the door to the Rainbow Resource Center in Memorial stopped (you hid in the vents in the ceiling and slid your eyes and your fingers out the grate towards the bigot who’d done it, sending them screaming) or that you figured out how to stretch thin enough that if you were naked, you were like — fucking hard to _perceive_ with the human eye, nearly translucent, and you could eavesdrop on the assholes hazing frosh in the fountain. 

You also told that one senior he was being _way_ too obvious trying to break into his geology prof’s office. You were just doing that guy a solid. 

“I’m busy,” you say, like an idiot, and her frown is exactly how somebody should respond to that shitty excuse. 

“You’re busy,” she says, and you bite down on your lip and reach for her, your fingertips glancing against her the back of her hand, and she pulls back away from you so fast that you wince back instinctively, except. Too far. 

Your hand shrinks into your wrist, into your forearm. It’d be funny — your fingers sticking out of the wrinkled skin at your elbow — if she wasn’t staring at you like you were a freak. 

She fishmouths at you. You can’t read her expression: can’t tell if she’s horrified or only shocked. You fumble your way out of the car, your fucking, God, your stupid hand figuring out how to be the normal shape so you can open the door, and you stumble onto the sidewalk and turn back to the car and stutter out, “Don’t — don’t, uh, don’t tell anyone, _please_ ,” and you take off down the pavement. 

💫💫💫 

She doesn’t tell anyone. She also doesn’t call you, and you don’t call her. 

You google the Bureau of Enhanced Defense. There’s an actual honest-to-God link on the website to _self-report preternatural abilities and help your community_. 

You’re a military family. Your dad’s retired but your sister’s just joined the Air Force, and everyone was fine that you weren’t interested. _Probably better_ , your dad had said, _given_ , and he’d waved his hand like that was the easiest way to summarize you. 

You blew up your relationship with somebody you were actually kind of — you thought you were gonna marry her. Fuck. _Fuck_ , because you were trying to help. 

You remember, suddenly, the article about that girl. Simone? She just wanted to help people. 

You’re not naive enough to trust the government. But if you could do something more than fucking saving cats from trees — 

💫💫💫 

It’s not what you expected. You couldn’t say exactly what you were envisioning — some kind of Professor X special school where you’re tutored by hot older agents, or the US version of M16. 

You’re one of three in your group. You don’t meet the other groups. The other groups only theoretically exist — you just can’t imagine it’s only you here. They have an entire fucking agency. 

Simone/Drumburst (actually Simone, _that_ Simone, the one you read about years ago) makes you feel welcome, and Clayton/GNU is quiet but you bond over video games (when he doesn’t get distracted taking the console apart to “make it better”). 

You do have training sessions, but no one else can do what you can, so it’s generalized: the kind of tactical shit your dad and sister probably know backwards and forwards. A lot of sitting in a classroom and doing actual fucking book leaning, like you didn’t have enough of that in college. 

And then there are the deployments — Clayton calls them field trips with a wry smile — which are usually boring. Reconnaissance. Heists. Lifting paperwork. One particularly exciting op had you sneaking into a skyrise to give GNU access to the server room: he was in there for ten minutes and you have no idea what he was doing, but when he came out he looked like he was fucking high on life. 

You don’t ever see immediate results. You aren’t able to connect A to B — can’t say that what you did actually helped your common man, but you can make some sense of it, sometimes. 

You tell yourself it’s enough. 

It’s enough when you get another member and they step on a Goddamn _landmine_ , and none of you know what the fuck to do about it (when was that gonna come up in training? when did any of you expect to find landmines in fucking Iowa? shit) and they die watching all of you from a safe distance. 

You’re at least doing something. What would you be able to do with nothing? At least it’s _something_. 

💫💫💫 

It’s easier to refer to the latest recruit as _the new guy_ in your head. It’s been easier since the landmine — when they’re new, it’s hard to tell how long they’ll stick around. (Which — that’s the least depressing way to say it, probably.) 

Even without the inherent danger of being part of a fucking superhero team, some people just don’t cut it — they don’t like the restrictions. The last two recruits left. Even though your apartments are paid for, they’re also chosen for you. You don’t get to tell people what you do. If they say jump, you say how high. 

“It’s like working at Area 51,” Simone says, her feet curled under her as you both sit on the couch in the lounge. She’d tried to shove them under you, and you’d arched your thighs up like a tunnel, her feet the cars. She’d muttered _you could’ve just said no_ and pulled them back. “Every morning I get onto an unmarked plane and fly into nowhere Nevada.” 

You snort. “My favorite unmarked plane: the blue line.” 

“We’re Goddamned _superheroes_ , we deserve something cool, Patri — oh! Oh, hey.” She tips her head back over the arm of the couch when the new guy appears in the doorway. He’s holding himself stiff, like he hadn’t expected you to be here — and then the awkwardness dissolves and he’s smiling, like he did when Director Long first introduced him. 

_Rivet_ , she’d said, and then pointed at the rest of you. _Drumburst. GNU. String._

He’d smiled pleasantly and not said a word, but maybe that was his thing. You usually don’t figure out anybody’s thing until you’re deployed. 

Simone swings her feet to the floor and turns to face him. “You want coffee? It’s overbrewed but you get used to it.” 

He nods and Simone gets him coffee from the ancient machine, handing him the lime green Mountain Dew mug that Clayton had bought you as your “teamiversary” gift, for still being alive. He grimaces when he takes his first sip, and then he smiles at you both and leaves. 

“Maybe he can mess with metal with his voice,” she muses. 

You huff a laugh. Her and Clayton had played that game with you — tried to figure out what you did, based on your callsign and how you’d acted when you’d showed up. Clayton had figured it out: walked up behind you and solemnly jabbed you in the side, and your torso had rippled away from the touch as you hollered, while Simone burst into delighted laughter. 

“Oh, shit, no.” She turns to you. “Maybe he spits nails!” 

💫💫💫 

The new guy does not spit nails. Well, okay, you have no idea what the new guy does, but you can’t imagine he’d have normal teeth if his mouth housed a bucket of metal, and he smiles pleasantly enough at all of you that you can confirm he’s got good old American braces-corrected chompers. It’s just the new guy showed up a month ago and hasn’t been deployed yet. So he’s either a greenhorn or — 

“They’re saving him for something,” GNU says as you review the dossier for your latest deployment. It’s simple reconnaissance, tracking a Saudi ambassador, which means GNU will be bugging the hell out of him and you’ll be infiltrating wherever you need to set up bugs. Drumburst doesn’t have a role in this one, aside from support: she’s pretending to review the blueprints of the ambassador’s condo, but you can see her phone in her lap, open to — Picross, maybe? 

She swears under her breath — heh, she ran out of lives — and looks up. “He seems nice enough.” 

You huff. “He hasn’t said two words to any of us.” 

She bites the inside of her cheek, shrugging a shoulder. “I said he _seems_ nice.” 

💫💫💫 

“Okay so, maybe there is something… weird about him,” Drumburst — well, no, you’re not suited up or doing Business now; here in the quiet of the lounge, sitting across from each other on the couch, she’s just _Simone_ , wearing lounge pants and a silk dressing gown, which she may actually have worn here. “Did you notice?” 

You look up from your book. (Usually you’d have your Switch, but Clayton always wants to fiddle with anything with a circuit board when he’s anxious, and today’s one of those days.) There’s definitely something weird about the new guy: the rest of you have apartments around Arlington, and if you wanted to you could have something resembling a social life. Simone goes to clubs sometimes. Clayton has been banned from every Radioshack within a 200-mile radius of the Pentagon. But you’re not sure the new guy… leaves. 

He still hasn’t been deployed yet, and you’re not going to pick at it; you’ve gotten invested in enough new people and watched them flame out quick, and you’re thirty or forty years old and do not need this. “You said I was weird too.” 

She laughs, soft enough you know that she’s focusing on it, how she always does when she’s not in action. “You were a big goof when you showed up. Like you could hide in that hoodie.” 

“I probably could,” you grouse, and she sits up, poking you with her foot. 

“Can you get small? I thought it was just stretchy stuff — oh my God, have you been holding out on me?” And you laugh, and the conversation shifts to her wanting you to show off your bendy limbs, _Patrick_. 

💫💫💫 

Rivet can control people with his fucking mind. 

Or — something. Something like that, holy shit, because he’s finally deployed with you for basic security duty, and yeah the Saudi ambassador’s there and you recognize faces from the little news you watch and that means more’s going on than was in the dossier, but you hadn’t thought — 

Rivet walks up to the ambassador and sways in close, drawing his lip in between his teeth before whispering something, low, _seductive_ , and the man looks at him and nods, and as Rivet rejoins you at the edge of the room and you’re opening your mouth to ask him _what the hell, man_ , the ambassador grabs a flute of champagne from a nearby tray and breaks it across one of the ritzy marble pillars in the ballroom, and stabs it into his own Goddamn throat. 

💫💫💫 

You shove him into a — shit, a janitorial closet, apparently, in the chaos after the ambassador kills himself. Shit. Under command by — 

"What the fuck?" Your arm is across his chest as you hold him against a shelf full of paper towels, and he blinks steadily at you, like you're boring him. 

"Drop it. Don't think about it. It's fine. Let me go," he says, steady words in a warm tone, and your grip relaxes. You breathe out slowly, staring at his unbothered expression, and — and okay, if he was assigned to your group and deployed, someone knows what's going on. It probably is fine. 

You lift your arm from his chest and — then you stop. Go still, and glare. "Don't mess with my head." 

“Let me go,” he repeats and there’s a bright burst within your brain that tells you you should, but you recognize it. A literal intrusive thought. And you can ignore it. 

When you don’t let him go, his eyes widen. His mouth falls open, and he breathes in sharply. “You — you don’t.” In a blur, he grabs at your arm and tries to throw you off him, but he’s a fucking noodle of a kid, doesn’t have the strength of a guy who can expand his muscles as much as he wants. His eyes dart around the closet and he’s breathing heavily now, and his hands are shaking on you as his fingers scrabble against your fancy ass dress shirt. 

“Chill.” You ease up and he goes rigid, his hands curled around as much of your fucking embiggened forearm as he can reach. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, chill out, I’m not gonna —” Hurt him? Is that what he’s worried about? Yeah, you know literally nothing about him but you’re his fucking teammate, what does he — 

“You won’t say anything about this,” he orders (you barely feel the thought this time, a passing suggestion) and then he screws his eyes shut, biting down on his lip. “You can’t — _please_ ,” he says, the word strained, like he’s not used to saying it. “Please don’t. You can’t say anything. You can’t tell anyone, String, you can’t tell them you don’t. You can’t. They can’t know.” He shakes his head, and his knees just give out on him — or maybe he’s having a panic attack, because he collapses into you and you nearly fall back with the sudden weight of him. 

GNU’s voice comes tinny through your comms. _String, Rivet. Location?_

Before Rivet fucking killed somebody, you were supposed to finish the night out and report back tomorrow morning; but you always have a back-up rendezvous point, in case something goes to shit. 

Rivet’s still shuddering, but his breathing’s slowed. You stretch one of your arms so you can keep supporting him but also tip his head up, careful, until you can see his face. 

When you were a kid you visited your grandparents during hunting season, and you went out with your uncles and grandpa. Rivet looks like the doe your uncle had shot, that he hadn’t killed outright — that he’d had to kill up close as the thing stared up at him in wordless terror. 

You touch your comms. “On our way.” 

Rivet shivers, a full body thing, and then he finds his footing. 

“I won’t tell anyone,” you say, and his shoulders slump and he nods once, and then he transforms: he holds his head up and smiles at you pleasantly, and pushes past you, back out into the commotion. 

💫💫💫 

“You obviously have questions.” 

Director Long is seated at the head of the table, the rest of you scattered around the room. Clayton’s close to the conference phone because he’s anxious: it’s going to be in pieces by the time this meeting is over. Simone’s furthest from the windows, because she’s always afraid she’ll get emotional and rack up a repair bill. You’re at the other end of the table, because it’s the closest to the door, and when you roll your head on your shoulders like you’re cracking your neck you can see out into the lounge, where Rivet’s sitting on the couch, his hands clasped on his lap. You can tell from this distance he’s bone white. 

Long goes through the need for secrecy. That she communicates what she’s able to, when she can, and that some directives come from above her paygrade. That Rivet’s abilities are specific, and dangerous, and that he’s deployed where he’s needed, when he’s needed. 

You lean forward. “He going back to wherever they usually keep him?” 

Long frowns. Purses her lips. The conference phone is already in pieces on the table between the two of you. Simone is gnawing on the inside of her cheek. Rivet is staring at the conference room as though he can hear what’s being discussed. 

“I’ve not received a reassignment order yet.” 

💫💫💫 

“I’m Simone.” Simone sticks her hand out, nearly under Rivet’s nose, and he jerks back before blinking warily up at her. “You can probably tell me your name, right? Without anything weird happening.” 

He glances at you, quick enough anyone would miss it if they weren’t you, before nodding. “Brian,” he says, and his voice creaks. 

“Hi Brian. I can scream so loud that it shatters glass and, often, eardrums.” 

He laughs and then looks surprised that he did, and Simone looks triumphant. 

💫💫💫 

Brian doesn’t get deployed often. It makes sense — if you had a literal kill word at your beck and call, you’d save it for the big stuff too. But he doesn’t get reassigned either. He’s always at the Office when you show up in the morning, coffee maker ready with a fresh pot, and he doesn’t leave when the rest of you do. 

He doesn’t talk, not unless there’s a simple answer to give, like when Clayton asks if he wants to play video games and he mutters _okay_. Simone discovers she’s gotta be specific when she asks him if he wants anything from the canteen: she asks him, open-ended, and he stares at her until she pulls up at the menu and reads through each item so he can give her a _yes_ or _no_. 

Well, he doesn’t talk to the _others_. 

You roll in later than everyone else, and so most nights you hang around later too. He’s still there. 

You offer him a bottle of iced tea from the fridge one night, and he considers it before accepting, like he knows there are conditions to taking it. Which, yeah. Not if he doesn’t want there to be, and you don’t _deserve_ anything, but. Shit. “When’d you join up?” 

Brian frowns. He’s already picking at the label on the bottle. “I was twelve.” 

You whistle, and he eyes you. “Just, young, huh? I joined after college.” 

He snorts. The label crinkles. “Yeah, you could hide yours though. Just don’t go all pretzel-y in public, Patrick.” 

“Just — at twelve I was more worried that acne was turning my face into pizza.” 

He hums but doesn’t reply. Eventually, after the silence has made you antsy, he says, “Why’d you join up?” 

“I wanted to help people,” you say immediately, because it’s _true_ but also because you think about it too. When you’re doing reconnaissance, when you’re doing a smash and grab, when you’re standing there with your mouth open while a team member gets somebody to kill themselves. 

He smiles wryly, and for a second his eyes crinkle like he’s gonna — fuck, cry? But the moment passes, and he starts tearing the bottle label into strips. “How’s that going for you?” 

_I haven’t killed anyone_ , you think meanly, and it startles you enough that you don’t say anything for a while. “Did you want to help people?” is what you say instead, and you watch as he lets the label strips flutter off his lap onto the floor. 

“I was twelve,” he says again. “I wanted to ride my bike and watch Jimmy Neutron.” 

💫💫💫 

Dynamight is named Jenna and she can, as she puts it, _punch the shit out of bricks_. You immediately want to arm wrestle her, and you don’t bring it up because you can’t be that guy. You don’t want to like, prove you’re stronger — because you almost certainly aren’t, except in a general anaconda kind of way. She’s just got fucking _guns_. 

Drumburst literally puts her hand to her chest the first time you’re on a field trip together and Dynamight pummels a steel barricade into salvage, which, yeah, you understand that reaction wholeheartedly, but you aren’t imagining the way Dynamight winks at her after. 

In the transport on your way back to the Office, Dynamight stretches her arms above her, tapping her fingers against the roof of the car. "I almost went with Gynomight, you know? Fucking girl power bullshit." 

She laughs, and from behind you Drumburst whispers, " _Fucking_ girl power," like it's the best thing she's ever heard, and while you're already starting to laugh she stage-whispers, "Punch. That. Pussy," and your laughter goes high-pitched and horrified and Dynamight shriek-laughs _Simone_. 

💫💫💫 

“Who’d you help today?” 

“Fuck you,” you say automatically and Brian chuckles before glaring down at the Switch screen. “You losing?” 

“Fuck you,” he replies, and you pause on your way to the couch because you’re… thinking about it. What that normally must result in, if Brian says it. 

“Wait. Wait, what happens when you, uh,” you start, and Brian grabs one of the throw pillows Jenna sewed and brought in, and chucks it at your head. 

💫💫💫 

Rivet’s only on the field trip as backup — just in case. It’s a straightforward smash and grab (Long would wring your neck for calling it that: it’s _reconnaissance_ , stop saying it’s _stealing_ , String) and all intel points to there being a single security guard at the front desk and another who walks each floor in succession. The latter should be halfway up the building’s 52 floors right now, and what you need is on floor 7. 

GNU’s jittery with excitement about the tech him and Dynamight have been working on, and Drumburst keeps complaining (whisper quiet) about how they’re just using her for her soundwaves. 

“Not _just_ for your soundwaves, baby,” Dynamight croons from under her balaclava, and Drumburst presses the back of her hand to her mouth so she doesn’t blow the op by laughing. 

You don’t understand the science of it, but it’s something about siphoning the power of Drumburst’s scream into Dynamight’s hit, so she can punch at the same frequency as sound. The speed of sound? Just a shit ton of tiny, repeating, powerful punches. 

Whatever, you have to break into a vault and GNU’s certain this will work. 

“Do you ever listen to everything they say and your brain like, shuts off?” 

Rivet’s at the door, and since you already got the team _in_ (buildings should secure their vents), you’re hanging back with him. 

He hums. “I have a grade school education.” 

From across the room, you hear GNU mutter something excited and victorious, followed by Dynamight pressing her fist against the vault door. “I don’t think they teach this in the American school system.” 

Rivet smiles at you, clearly wry even through the balaclava, and as Drumburst joins Dynamight at the vault, all hell breaks lose. 

The wall of windows overlooking the city shatter as — shit, count them, _count them_ , five? people in tactical gear rappel into the room from outside. They’re heavily armed, all in black, were you set up? Fuck. 

Drumburst must hit her switch because you can’t hear anything suddenly, the comms in your ears converting to the fanciest Goddamn earplugs on the planet right before she opens her mouth. You can _feel_ the reverberations from the scream, heavy and throbbing in your chest like the bass at a metal concert, and the guards (shit, guards? who the fuck —) react as one, hands going over their ears except for the one closest to her who contorts, their mouth visible through their helmet, open in a scream of their own as they convulse to the floor. 

The goal in a shitshow like this is getting out. You’re too valuable to risk in a fight, a maxim that has been instilled in your head since the beginning, and Rivet _definitely_ is, so you push him out the door, start to herd him towards the other side of the building: the elevator’s not going to be a good idea, but you can get him to the ground. 

He shoves back against you and you can see his mouth moving, but you can’t hear him. You shake your head, try to enunciate _we need to GO_ , but he shakes his head and slips back into the room, _shit_ , and it’s eerie to follow him and see Dynamight laying into a guard in pure silence, Drumburst with her hands in the vest of another one, shrieking directly into his ear. 

Rivet stops just inside the door and all of the guards shudder and turn towards him, even — fuck, even the one Drumburst had taken out right out the gate, moaning on the floor. He can still hear well enough to be commanded. 

You fumble with your comms, your gloved fingers barely able to get a hold, but you yank them out in time to hear Rivet ordering them: 

“Walk out the windows. If you live, crawl into the street. If there’s water in the gutters, drown in it. If —” 

You grab him by the arm and swing him around. Behind him, they’re already moving to obey. “Don’t, fuck, we don’t know who they are, they could be — don’t. Don’t! Hey!” One of the guards is at the window, staring down the seventy odd feet to the pavement. They don’t respond when you yell. “ _Rivet_ , c’mon, don’t — just, can you make them forget?” 

“Stop,” he says, and you don’t know if he’s talking to you or not, but neither do they: the guard doesn’t walk out the window. The rest of them have stopped moving. You don’t know what the rest of the team is doing. You’re staring at him. You can’t see much of his face through the balaclava, but his eyes are strained. His jaw, tense. 

You lick your lips. “Who does this help?” 

He rounds on you, gritting his teeth, and you ignore your hindbrain, telling you to step the fuck back. “You don’t remember this,” he says, staring you down, and the guards behind him start shuffling around. Or moaning, given one of them’s bleeding out of his ears. “If someone asks you what happened here, you burst through the windows and the room was empty. If you start to remember what happened, you’ll —” 

“ _Rivet_.” 

“You won’t remember _me_. You got your asses handed to you but you won’t remember me.” 

💫💫💫 

You’ve hooked up with Simone after field trips. She’d looked at you the first time, adrenaline racing through your veins, and asked, “D’you wanna go to BED?” and you’d still been laughing after you’d pushed her pants out of the way to lick into her. 

You’ve hooked up with Clayton too — or tried. There was an attempt. He’d had his hand on your dick and then he’d fucking zoned out, and after a solid minute during which you debated whether or not he was like, _okay_ , he blinked rapidly, said, “I’m using the wrong coupler,” and ran off. You don’t _think_ it was a commentary on your dick, because after you’d sucked yourself off when you realized he wasn’t coming back, you’d found him in the lab, bent over something sparking. 

Brian is incandescent. He keeps his eyes locked on you in the transport, and there’s no ounce of _smiling pleasantly_ in him. You feel like there’s pure electricity under your skin. You can’t keep your leg from bouncing, and when you lick your lips his eyes follow your tongue. 

Everybody scatters after, to the showers or to fuck each other, or to fuck _in_ the showers (you’ve walked in on… a lot), except you and Brian. Brian goes to the lounge and starts pouring himself coffee, and you follow him. 

You say, “Thank you,” and watch his shoulders tense. “For not killing them.” 

He puts the mug onto the counter and then slams his fist down next to it, nearly knocking it off onto the floor. Coffee splashes onto his hand. He rounds on you and you know _he_ can’t get any bigger than his body, but it feels like he has, like he’s filling the whole room. 

“We don’t even know what was in the vault,” he hisses, and he’s — right. He’s right, and you know if he asked, you couldn’t tell him why you did _anything_ , most of the time, which. “Why were we there, Patrick? Why were we.” He shoves a hand into his hair and looks at the wall. 

“Because sometimes it helps people,” you say, and it sounds just as stupid as it does in your head. As it does every time you remind yourself that that’s why you signed up for this, originally. That you thought you could help people; that being a pawn in the CIA and FBI’s master plans would be worth it in the end. 

Brian glares at you, and you want to smooth out his tousled hair. Fuck. You want to touch his angry mouth with your fingertips. “Does it? Does it help people?” 

You’re distracted by the flush on his cheeks. You’re so Goddamn used to getting off after an op and your attention’s split between your dick and the argument, which. Isn’t particularly fair to the topic, but. Fuck. Fuck his self-righteousness, too. “More than I could on my own! I just — stopped perverts on campus. Which is noble, sure, but what about —” 

“We don’t even know what was in the vault!” Brian throws his hands out and looks at you like you’re an idiot. 

“Does it even matter?” You hate yourself when you say it; it hasn’t mattered to you in a while. Shit. “We’re doing _something_. We chose to be here.” 

“Fuck you.” 

And because your brain’s currently split between your head and your pants, you feel the insinuation of it and you let it happen: “Yeah?” 

“ _Yeah_ , you naive fucking —” He has to notice how you’re looking at him because his anger transmutes into something else — owl-eyed and blinking. He swallows and you watch the line of his throat. He glances down at your dick tenting your pants and draws in a shuddering breath. 

“Fuck you,” he says again, and then his hands are on you. 

💫💫💫 

He’s all over you like he doesn’t know where to start, beautifully overeager, God, if he joined up as a kid, maybe he doesn’t, maybe — 

“Fuck, do you want,” you gasp against his mouth, trying to catch his hands. They’re in your hair, and then one’s against your neck, your shoulder, then dropping to the belt on your dumbass black cargo pants and tugging like he’s forgotten how belts work. 

“Yes,” he says, and you laugh because Goddamn can you show him a good time if he wants it. You can direct all the strange, fucking uncomfortable stressful energy and the sheer joy of being _alive_ into something solid, something physical. 

You get your pants down around your ankles and you work at his while he tries to lick your fucking tonsils, and you’re cycling through all your options and you decide on probably — probably the quickest bang for your buck (ha). You push him away enough that you can turn, lean against the wall and push back against his dick. You wanna memorize the sound he makes, _shit_ , like he’s already close to coming, a guttural whine as his dick slides between your ass. 

“Do you, do, uh, do,” he stutters, his hot breath against the back of your neck, and you reach back and slide your fingers through his hair, memorize that sound too, the whimper as you tug at the roots, and. Shit. 

“Uh, get your hand wet, touch your dick,” you tell him, and you feel the shudder pass through him as you hear him follow your direction, as you hear the wet slide of his hand on his dick, as you feel him press against your hole like he can’t help himself. “Fuck, yeah, _yeah_ , okay —” And you’ve not done this before. Well. Not with another person. You’ve definitely explored your body in all the beautiful ways God for sure didn’t intend, but. “You’re gonna have a real distorted view on the realities of sex,” you say, and he’s laughing, wet heat against your skin as you — fucking open for him. Invite him in to _party_. 

“What the — fuck,” he bites out, and he snaps his hips forward because he can’t help himself, _fuck_ , and you tighten your grip in his hair and put your forearm between your cheek and the wall, so you don’t brain yourself as he fucks into you. 

It’s not the smoothest of slides, God, you should’ve grabbed lube or — hell, there’s probably something in one of the cabinets you could’ve repurposed, but you’ve got a handle on this, his dick’s heavy and hot in you and you’re — deeply frustrated you didn’t get to see it — 

“Couch.” You push back against him and he bites down on your shoulder, shit, and you loosen enough around him that he slips out with a punched-out sound, and you insist, “ _Couch_ ,” again, before stumbling together towards it, losing clothes on the way, “so I don’t freak you the fuck out,” and you push him back onto the cushions and clamber on top of him, “twisting my neck around to see you.” 

He’s gonna bruise your hips, the way he’s holding onto you, and you get a look at his fat dick, a Goddamn pleasant mouthful, before you guide him back into you, let him in. His head tips back on the couch, neck on full display, and you lean over and kiss below his jaw, scrape your teeth over him while he fucks up into you. God, while he chases his orgasm, like he’s so lost in it he’s forgotten you’re here. 

His hips start shuddering, his breathing erratic, and you — shit, will this be okay? But your mind’s gone, nothing but the move of him in you registering, the little friction your dick’s getting against his stomach, and you bite at his ear and tell him, “Order me to, to come,” and his hands shake on your hips, and he looks up at you and — 

He whispers, low, seductive, “Come, Pat,” and you don’t push it away, you don’t let it pass through you: you bury your face against the back of the couch and shout as you do what you were told, come striping his chest as he shakes apart inside you. 

💫💫💫 

“Have you done that before?” You’re both sprawled out on the couch. His tone is suspiciously calm, like he’s asking the question so you can’t ask _him_. If you weren’t so comfortably loose, you’d worry about someone wandering in. It smells _rank_ in here. Also, your pants are somewhere by the fridge, and your modesty is currently only protected by the shitty fleece blanket Clayton bought on sale. 

His hands are carding through your hair. Your face is smashed up against his chest. His armpit hair’s tickling your nose. If you cared, you could just move it a little to the left — but you kind of like how he smells. You like the smell of his sweat. 

“Yeah,” you say, because it’s true for most of the answers to that question. Maybe not coming untouched, but. 

His hands stop. “Oh,” he says, and you awkwardly push yourself up, find places to put your hands so you don’t crush him. He looks owl-eyed again. He looks fucking wrecked: flushed cheeks, bruised lips. There’s a hickey in the dip above his collarbone. 

You’ve had sex with half the team, and it’s been — ha, a teambuilding exercise. Blowing off steam. Nothing to hold onto. Nothing that made your chest ache, like the way he’s looking at you does now. 

You lie down on top of him, weight pressing him into the couch cushions, and you kiss him. 

💫💫💫 

Brian doesn’t get reassigned. He still doesn’t go out on field trips that often. When you come back from the first one without him, he finds you in the showers and lets you work through the adrenaline with him. (In him.) He still keeps mostly quiet, unless you’re alone — when he gets a kick out of you ignoring his demands. (And likes it more when you do what he asks, because you’re _choosing_ to kiss him.) 

You get another recruit, and like it was with Jenna, you find yourself immediately thinking of him as _Amp_ or even _Josh_ , instead of as somebody disposable. He tells you all that he just — amplifies shit, and you spend the better part of a day figuring out what that actually means. If he’s nearby, you can stretch literally across the length of the Pentagon, and you are absolutely going to test if you can do the full perimeter in the near future. Simone gets him equipped with comms and immediately turns everyone’s on, and then screams at the metal table in the lounge. Jenna cracks her knuckles gleefully, and Clayton looks a little glassy-eyed at whatever prospects are circulating in his nerd brain. 

Brian doesn’t volunteer what he does, and Josh doesn’t press him for it. He does ask, “He mute?” to you when you’re alone in the lounge, and you shake your head. 

“It’s complicated,” you say, and when Brian speaks up behind you, you almost spill your coffee: 

“I can order you to do anything I want you to,” he says, simple as anything, with that stupid pleasant smile he falls back on when he’s not sure of his footing. You don’t need to protect him: out of everybody in the entire Goddamn Pentagon, he’s the person you need to protect _least_. But you still want to… shepherd him away from the conversation. Just a little. 

Josh grunts. Leans back against the counter. “Like, anything?” 

“Within the realm of possibility.” 

Josh raises his brows. “Shit. Wow, okay. So you could tell me to…” He holds up his mug. “To drink this. Burn my throat.” 

Brian glances at you and then back to Josh, and Josh nods to confirm he’s game. 

“Drink the entire mug,” he says, and even though it’s not directed at you, you still feel the warm compulsion of it, the urge to do as you’re told, to please him. (It was — maybe a mistake, to turn it into a sex thing.) 

Josh lifts the mug to his mouth and then he pauses. He holds it there, even takes a little sip, and then he _whoos_ and pulls it away. “Whew, man. Whoa. That — that felt so weird, that — hey, did I just break your power? Am I _special_?” 

You’re still staring at Josh, trying to parse what exactly just happened, when Brian turns on his heel and books it. While you’re standing stock still like an asshole, you hear him talking to Simone, hear her confusion, and then you hear him disappear through the hermetically-sealed doors of the lab. 

“Did I just break his power?” Josh asks you, and you force yourself into motion. Find Brian in the lab, just in time to catch him as he slumps towards the floor. 

💫💫💫 

You still don’t know where he sleeps — he’s not taken you back to his room. You’ve fucked on nearly every surface in the Office, not that you’ll ever say that aloud, but you’ve never seen a room. So you lay him out on the couch with Clayton’s shitty blanket over him. 

“And he just — passed out?” Jenna asks, and she’s got that look on her face where the parts of her that love breaking the law and that make her your _mom friend_ are clearly warring. 

“He’s been lied to his whole life,” you say. Your stomach hurts. You want to climb onto the couch with him. Want to cover him with your body, like another blanket. “He’s been doing this since he was twelve, and he didn’t know there was an out.” 

“I just stumbled onto it?” Josh asks, and you feel like a total dumbass. Because he did, but you did too. Hell, everyone at the ballroom knew what Brian could do, and you just never tested it because you assumed you were. Fuck. 

“I knew,” you say, “but I thought I was.” Special, you don’t say, because the word is cut glass in your mouth. 

“He only leaves on assignment,” Simone says. She’s wrapped her arms around herself. “He never talked enough for me to figure out… I think he lives here. Not in the Office, but.” 

You don’t plan. You can come up with ideas, sure, but when it comes to actual _plans_ you rely on GNU. 

“Clayton, can you pull his records? If you really wanted to?” 

Clayton nods immediately. “Sure. Josh can help me get to his; it’s locked down.” 

Simone frowns. “Just his?” 

To his credit, Clayton is nonplussed. “I’ve already read each of yours.” 

💫💫💫 

Brian tells Simone to move over on the couch, so he can sit between you and her. He looks pale. Kind of greenish. He knows how this is going to go, that expression says. He knows Simone will move. 

When she doesn’t, when she looks up at him and tells him, “I’m good, babe,” his hands start to shake. He breathes slowly. He runs his thumbs over the tips of his fingers. He looks at you. 

“Pat, make Simone move over,” he tells you, and you give him a quick grin before shoving her to the side, and her hollers just start to hurt your ears. 

💫💫💫 

You almost blow the plan. You don’t even _know_ the plan, not in its entirety — you aren’t the brains of the Office — but you’ve got Brian laid out underneath you on the couch and he’s staring up at you with his wide eyes, and you think about telling him you’re gonna get him out of here. You’re gonna give him everything, let him be normal: let him sleep in and hog the covers and burn breakfast and — 

“Fuck, _more_ ,” he orders you, and thank God you had the foresight weeks ago to hide lube between the cushions because he opened up so sweet for you tonight, until his eyes had darkened and he’d told you he’d wanted it, until he’d asked you if your dick could get as big as you’d wanted, too. 

You’ve never tried it, not — not fucking somebody. Hard to explain how you were such a _grower_ to most of your partners, and Simone had always preferred you eat her out to penetration. But Brian — he wants it, wants you to — 

“Fill me with your cock, pretzel boy,” he croons, and you drop your head to his shoulder and whine, you don’t have to move your hips if you don’t want to, can just fuck him with the — God, your shapeshifting dick, pulsating in him like a heartbeat, and when you come you collapse across him, try to work up the energy to slide down his body to suck down his dick, and he pets your head while you float. 

And you think, _We’re gonna get you out of here_. 

And you almost say it, until the delicious compulsion of his next order tickles your ears, and you let him command you to get him off. 

💫💫💫 

“I’m thinking meatball,” Amp says over comms. “With the sauce? Exquisite.” 

Dynamight hums. “Wait, we talkin’ actual lunch order, or hypotheticals?” 

You hiss, a quick _skt_ between your teeth, and they shut up while you approach security. After the metal detector _buzzes_ as you walk through, one of the agents waves you to the side. Tells you to spread your arms and legs. The wand goes haywire across your chest like you knew it would, and you frown before looking confused. 

“You got a pacemaker?” the guard asks gruffly. 

You feign relief. “Yeah. Sorry, uh, it usually doesn’t set anything off.” 

The guard grunts — _shitty wands_ — and waves you on, and you head for the bathroom closest to the checkpoint. You hide in a stall and inhale slowly. Exhale. Focus on the shape on your face. When you were first brought on by BED, they’d asked if you wanted plastic surgery — you’d stared at them blankly and then moved your nose, widened your lips, sunk your eyes into your face. You used to have to look into a mirror to make it look natural, but you can just concentrate on the weight of your skin now: on the density of your bone. 

Sometimes you use your hands, like your own body is clay — rearranging the face of the man who walked through security. Flattening your cheekbones, smoothing your jaw, into another man’s face. Not your face; but it wasn’t your face when you walked through security, either. 

It matches the ID card you clasp onto your shirt pocket though, and that’s what’s important. 

You leave the bathroom and head to the elevator. On the fourth floor there’s a supply room with access to the vents, which provide access to most of the building — rotating fan blades aside. 

You seal the supply room door shut behind you using one of GNU’s gum pastes and get to work: you let your legs and arms relax. Let your skin unwrap from around the plastic components and bags of… chemicals? Amp and GNU had labored over, that you don’t understand but that you’ve still memorized the process to construct. 

You lean forward and cup your hand below your chest, and you breathe out as the detonators pop out from the folds above your heart. You were a little bummed they didn’t ask to see: Dynamight worked with you until they looked like scars, your stretched skin knit together and ridged. It took you fucking weeks to perfect, until one night Rivet had touched your shoulder on the couch and said, _This one looks old but I don’t remember it._

You’d almost blown your cover then. You hadn’t lied to him — he’s been lied to enough, but you’d let your skin relax and told him you were _trying out something new_. 

You sit on your ass and start to assemble the devices. (“GNU says we have to call them _devices_ , or we sound like amateurs,” Drumburst had said, as the two of you walked through how to put them together for the umpteenth time.) There are five: one for each corner of the room, and one for the center. 

From your current position, you need to stretch across the length of the Pentagon to plant them. Amp and you had trained together, until you could do it without him next to you. Like getting more limber. 

You check your watch. 

In 20 minutes, a meeting will take place in a nondescript room on the other side of the Pentagon. In that meeting there will be seven people, fortunately not including Director Long — who really did only know as much as you did, GNU had confirmed. 

“Drumburst’s been here the longest of us,” he’d said, and he’d scrolled through her file. When he’d opened Rivet’s, it’d dwarfed hers. “He has seven handlers. I can check their schedules.” 

He’d checked their schedules. You’d figured out the plan. 

At T-minus 15, you elongate your arm and wrap it around each of the devices, and stick the detonators in the skin at your wrist. Then you head into the vents. 

💫💫💫 

Drumburst’s quiet in your ear. “You do it?” 

You’re back in the supply closet, trying to remember what your face looked like when you entered. “Yeah.” 

GNU clears his throat. He’s somewhere on the first floor, reading a Kindle. He’s modded it to send an electric charge. You don’t know how he did it, but when he’d soldered it back up he’d grabbed Amp by the collar and kissed him, so you assume it was a process. “I’m ready.” 

“Ten,” Dynamight says as you leave the supply closet. You silently count down with her. 

“Bababooey,” Amp says in your ear. 

You inhale. Exhale. “Bababooey.” 

And GNU activates the detonators. 

💫💫💫 

The transport is where Dynamight said it would be. 

Brian’s sitting passenger, because Brian can’t be in the Office right now: his security clearance has been revoked. To be more specific, it never existed. 

“Drumburst said,” he starts, and you shake your head. His expression is tense. He trusts you, but he still looks freaked; once you’ve driven past security, he tries again: “I know there’s a bag of my things in the back.” 

You’d finally tracked down his room; it was in his file. The bed was about as comfortable as the shitty couch in the lounge. He didn’t have much stored in there otherwise, but there was a guitar. There was a bedraggled, stuffed dog, and when Simone had held it up, you’d thought _twelve years old_. 

“Everything in your room, yeah,” you say as you merge onto 395. 

“I’m not supposed to leave unless I’m on deployment.” It sounds so much like something he’s been told. Like every other shitty little thing he’s lived with, most of which you don’t know anything about. “I heard the alarms.” 

“Something must’ve happened,” you say, and Brian stares out at the rapidly passing buildings. You’re not sure the last time he left the Pentagon for an extended period of time was. You’re not sure if he’s been in actual public since he was a kid. 

“Give me your phone,” he says, and you point to the glove box. He pulls it out and unlocks it, starts searching. Reading. He starts to breathe more slowly, like he’s forcing it. Trying to be calm. “What did you do?” 

“I think there was an explosion,” you say, and you’re worried he’s gonna start hyperventilating. Maybe you should’ve put him in the back, where they aren’t windows. Maybe you underestimated whether or not somebody who’d lived in the Pentagon for a decade was agoraphobic. 

“You think,” he stutters, and he covers his mouth with his hand and sinks into the seat, his eyes glued to your phone. 

💫💫💫 

You keep driving. 

In Pennsylvania, you exchange vehicles. Josh arranged it, and a man who’s gotta be his dad — or an uncle — gives you the keys to an old cream-colored Camry. 

Brian’s still quiet. Your phone’s at 15%, and there’s no charger in the Camry. 

There’s food in the transport, and if you need to piss, you pull over to the side of the road. 

“Do you need to sleep?” he asks you when you hit New Hampshire. 

You ask, “Can you drive?” and he shakes his head. You keep driving. 

💫💫💫 

Your dad’s surprised to see you. He’s got a bat in his hand, because it’s 4am and you knocked on the door loud enough to wake the neighbors. He squints out into the dark and says, “Patrick?” and you hook your thumb behind you. 

“And Brian.” 

Brian looks like he’s about to shit bricks. 

“He can command you to do anything in the realm of possibility until you know he can do it, which you do now, so he’s harmless.” 

Your dad blinks. Brian mutters _hey_ quietly. Your dad lets you both in. 

Your mom sleeps like the dead so you know she won't greet you till morning. Your dad takes you to your room, like you don't remember where it is, and when he fumbles in the hallway, looking at Brian, you step in: 

"It's okay. It's a double. We can share." 

He looks between the two of you, and he settles on you. "You AWOL, son?" 

You smile at him, tight-lipped, and he whispers _fuck_ under his breath and goes to bed. 

"Pat." 

Your room is mostly how it was when you left got college, which is sweet. Your parents kept it for you. You've still got all your metal posters. There's one of Hulk Hogan too, which is embarrassing in hindsight. 

"Pat," Brian says again, and you sit down on your bed. "What are you doing?" 

"Who've I helped today?" You twist your hand in your TMNT comforter and watch him cycle through different emotions: disbelief, relief, fear. 

"This isn't going to work," he settles on, and you smile up at him. 

"Tell me it will." 

"What?" 

"Anything in the realm of possibility, yeah?" 

He laughs, rubbing a hand over his eyes. "That's not how it works. That's not how…" But he drops his hand to his side. Moves towards you, and you spread your knees to let him stand close. 

You've always wanted to help people. And you have and you haven't, and within the last 24 hours you've been responsible for 7 deaths that hopefully can't be tied to you, and if GNU's right then they won't want to come looking for Brian because there's nothing the US government likes more than pretending something didn't happen. 

"Pat," he says, and you lift his hand to your mouth and press a kiss into his palm. 

He closes his eyes. He touches your face. You feel the warmth of his words, and you could always push back, but you don't need to: 

"We're gonna be okay." 


End file.
